


did I ever love you?

by louis_quatorze



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Kraglin has a past too, M/M, a lot of feelings, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-03 01:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11522082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louis_quatorze/pseuds/louis_quatorze
Summary: Everyone liked Yondu. Kraglin might have been the only one who loved him.





	did I ever love you?

_Did I ever love you_  
_Did I ever need you_  
_Did I ever fight you_  
_Did I ever want to?_

__

(Leonard Cohen, "Did I Ever Love You?")

~

Everyone liked Yondu. That was why he was captain.

People tended to think that Ravager captains were the fiercest among them, the strongest, the most ruthless. Captains were certainly all of those things, but so was every Ravager. Captains weren’t any more than the rest of them, most of the time. Maybe a few more skills, some of them, but for the most part the difference was that they were likeable. People, generally, liked Captains, despite themselves, despite not really wanting to a lot of the time. It was the only way a ship could actually run. Threats wouldn’t keep a Clan together. No one worked like that for very long. 

A lot of people didn’t realize that. A lot of Ravangers didn’t realize that. But, as Kraglin always knew, a lot of people were fucking stupid. 

People didn’t like Kraglin the way they liked Yondu. That was okay. Yondu liked Kraglin, and for Kraglin, that had always been enough.

~

“You’re too smart f’us, you know,” Yondu once said to him with a grin, not too very long ago, kissing the top of Kraglin’s head before slouching into a chair with one of those serials he liked, the hologram flashing over his skin as he flicked it on. 

“Probably,” Kraglin replied, smirking in Yondu’s general direction before turning his attention back to the reports. Yondu could sign his name with a flourish that made it seem like he could do a lot more with letters. He couldn’t, but Kraglin had been a Syndicate trainee before Yondu had picked him up, long beyond numbers and letters and into double-entry bookkeeping and contract law. He was lucky that the Syndicate and the Ravagers worked together, were allies, at least enough that they weren’t willing to fight a war or even a skirmish over a skinny trainee, clever though he was. Helped that his boss laughed when Kraglin said he was joining the Ravagers, thought that he was infatuated and would be back in a month when it wore off. 

Zubrink was half right. Kraglin was infatuated, because Yondu Udonta was always charming, always compelling, but in his prime he was beyond extraordinary. Kraglin felt like he would have followed him anywhere just to be graced by his approval (and maybe even actually would have gone somewhere that would anger the Syndicate, maybe). He’d swooped into the dive that Kraglin and the other low-street trainees favored, the one that made them feel like big-shots and not poor kids with a moderate amount of money, and had Kraglin back in his rooms about two hours later. Kraglin didn’t leave until two days after, and that was to quit.

Yeah, he’d been infatuated.

Zubrink was only half right, though, because it didn’t wear off. Yondu never stopped being anything less than incandescent. And Kraglin didn’t know what Yondu kept seeing in him, but there was something, enough to keep this all going.

There were other things Kraglin liked about being a Ravager. The Syndicate had dressed them like slightly flashier versions of the Xandarian conglomerates they were the shadow of, something that had appealed to some of Kraglin’s fellow trainees but had made him feel like he was constantly acting. The Syndicate kept them indoors, had them on office hours, which Kraglin had always chafed at. He got the tattoos he’d secretly wanted, the haircut he felt suited him. He felt like a new person with the Ravagers, swearing and fighting like he’d never really done, but wanted to. He was a real outlaw, not an outlaw’s accountant. He learned to throw knives. He was good at it. (He still did the accounting. But they were a big crew, a big ship. Someone had to do it.)

Still, though, it came back to the way Yondu smiled at him, the way he left his hand on Kraglin’s shoulder. The way he relaxed with him. Trusted him.

Kraglin was smart, sure, but when it mattered he tended to be pretty foolish. That was love, at least according to everything he’d heard about the topic. Mostly, he was pretty okay with it. Could be worse ways to live.

~

Captains were sentimental. All of them. Their crews always tried to write off its manifestations as some eccentricity, something that didn’t matter because their Captain was the strongest and fiercest, and the eccentricity just made it more frightening, right? But Kraglin spent a long time out with the Ravagers, and he was a smart guy who didn’t talk much. Spent a lot of time taking in information, considering, making his judgement.

Captains were sentimental. Part of people liking them – they liked people, they cared about their crew. Kraglin figured in something like the Nova Corps, something legit, their captains would just be clear about it. Ravagers, though, it came out weird. 

Stakar had his Code, like he was in a goddamn serial where thieves were noble and free, striking out against a dull and uncaring galaxy. It was bullshit, in Kraglin’s opinion, but he’d grown up around organized thievery. It was as boring or romantic as anything else. It sucked for the people he stole from. He tried not to think about it. Anything with Codes, with laws, all dramatic like that, was sentimental bullshit. But Stakar was a captain. That was how they were.

Yondu had…well, everything. It was all wrapped in sarcasm and that whistle of his, but it was obvious to Kraglin, at least, and probably some of the smarter crew. There was something sentimental in the core of Yondu, something that the galaxy somehow hadn’t burned out of him. He’d follow it like an instinct, doing little extras to please the crew, taking jobs that logically, strictly, they shouldn’t, if the story was good. 

(Once he brought Kraglin a painting. A real one, and pretty, an artist that Kraglin had seen when he’d been back on Xandar, one of those trips where they tried to educate the lower-streets kids that never really worked except that Kraglin had liked the paintings. He’d only ever told Yondu about it, and he shouldn’t have been surprised when it was listed as lost in an inventory of the freight convoy of a Axi-Tun CEO they ripped off instead of sent to Stakar and the Syndicate for fencing. He was anyway. It was still on the wall, despite everything.)

Kraglin should have figured that the two sentimentalities would fuck each other up. They were fundamentally incompatible. Yondu with his recklessness, Stakar with his rules. Opposites. It was going to blow up sooner or later, but Kraglin wasn’t really a contingency-plan kind of guy. That was Yondu’s job. 

“He just wants us to take his kid to him,” Yondu said, and they were alone so the hope in his eyes was undimmed by the preening sarcasm he used in front of the crew. “It ain’t trafficking. It’s his damn kid.”

Yondu was sentimental, Yondu had a softness to him, and Kraglin’s pride was that Yondu let him see it. Yondu had decided somewhere after taking him out to space that Kraglin could be trusted, and Kraglin guarded that fiercely. He couldn’t argue against Yondu when he had that look in his eyes, the one that said he was trying to do the right thing. 

Kraglin thought…Kraglin thought the money was good, for such easy work, and he’d always had a head for the dry numbers that went into their industry. He knew it couldn’t be all so straightforward, but he hoped that Yondu’s silver tongue would get Stakar to agree. And he couldn’t say no to Yondu, not then. He was still infatuated. (He would never stop.)

He’d had a lot of faith in Yondu. 

Stakar didn’t.

Looking back, Kraglin wasn’t sure what he could have done differently. Ego had done his research, found the captain who would know how to do the work (they’d done kidnappings before, ransom jobs, good money, but required a professionalism to not break the captive before it was paid), with the unique combination of greedy and broken that came out of a childhood as a Kree battle slave. He wanted everything and he wanted family most of all, would be suckered in by a pile of units offered by a man who just wanted to see his child, bring him home. He would have known that the combination would ensure he got what he wanted, that the story and the greed would reinforce each other and convince a stubborn, needy Centaurian that he was right and everyone else had it wrong. 

Stakar, the exile, just convinced Yondu more. Ego would have known that. 

Kraglin followed him into it, because where else would he go? He liked Stakar all right, but he wasn’t Yondu. And Kraglin had never much believed in a code to begin with. He’d been Syndicate. He knew better. 

“You and me against the whole galaxy, eh Lins?” Yondu had said to him when they were back on the ship, quietly, eyes glowing sad in the dim light. 

“Always,” Kraglin replied, because someone had to be, because Yondu picked him of everyone on Xandar, and even if Yondu had done wrong, he’d done it for the right reasons. (Even the greed, because they wouldn’t be in this line of work if that wasn’t a virtue.) It felt like a privilege to stand next to him against the entire universe. 

~

Stakar didn’t break Yondu, he was far too stubborn for that, but he left a fracture, something not even Kraglin noticed for years. A little crack in the lining of his brain, a little knowledge that whatever he got out of his new life was conditional. Not enough to break him, but enough to make him a little meaner, a little more callous. 

Which was okay. They were outlaws’ outlaws now, and Yondu needed to be a little meaner to keep the crew liking him, the sort of sharp jokes and quick whistles that said this was the man to follow, this was who you wanted to be. Fearless, free, didn’t take shit from anyone. The outlaw’s outlaw. The legendary Yondu Udonta. 

In their quarters, Yondu was still soft, sentimental. His Yondu, as Kraglin liked to think, only his, because he was greedy too, in a different way. He’d come from a big family, too many children, not enough time. He always wanted someone’s undivided attention, always hoarded love. If he was the one Yondu was soft with, the only one who saw him scream and rage and collapse when he realized what Ego was doing to the kids they brought to him, then Kraglin was…not happy, because Yondu wasn’t happy, but content in his way, validated, necessary.

(The truth was harder than Stakar. Yondu had made himself believe he was doing the right thing. He was willing to fight Stakar for it. Being wrong was a wound in his heart and his pride, one he was barely willing to let Kraglin try and stich up. No one liked being wrong.) 

“We’re keepin’ this one,” Yondu said about the Terran boy, fierce and defiant and wild. “He ain’t paid. He ain’t gettin’ the kid ‘til he’s paid. We ain’t workin’ with him again ‘til he does.”

Kraglin did the books. He knew Ego only paid on delivery, at least the last two. But he also knew Yondu’s pain, knew his softness. Kraglin loved that about him, the way it never really went away. The way that he tried so hard to live up to it, the way it got all mixed up with his fierceness and arrogance and pride. He’d known as soon as Yondu had asked what happened to the last kid that they were keeping this one. 

Gods, but he was small, though. 

~

Quill was Yondu’s project. Kraglin understood why they kept him, but that didn’t mean he really wanted to deal with the fact of having him. He’d grown up with too many other kids to have much affection for them, had wanted to get out of being one as soon as he could. Taking one on, having to live with it for however-many years it took Terrans to stop being children, Kraglin couldn’t say it was what he wanted. He liked living his life among adults.

But then, he wasn’t broke in the same way Yondu was, like so much of the rest of the crew, even. He’d had two parents, okay ones, ones that he went back to Xandar for on Solstice and generally tolerated for two weeks because even though they got on his nerves, he did love them. They’d been poor, a lot of kids, and his dad had been the sort of petty criminal with more stories than sense, in and out of the Nova prisons, but other than the lingering sense of resentment that his siblings, older and younger, always got more than he did, Kraglin’s childhood had been fine. Kind of normal, other than growing up with the gangs as a family business. (His one lingering regret at leaving the Syndicate was how proud being accepted as a trainee made his father, who always saw them as the ultimate of what people in his line of work could be. He’d give it up again, it was his life to live, but sometimes he thought about it.)

He knew that was a rarity. He didn’t talk about it much. He brought Yondu back to Xandar sometimes. Yondu got along better with his dad than Kraglin did, but then, that was typical for both of them. 

But Yondu didn’t have that, and Yondu wanted it so badly, and while there was part of him that would always smart at not being enough for Yondu (wouldn’t he ever be enough for anyone?) Kraglin understood it, on an intellectual level. They kept the kid. Yondu got determined to keep him safe, to teach him the sort of things that would keep him alive in their world. Kraglin helped where he could, but this was Yondu’s project, Yondu’s responsibility, and Kraglin was happy to let him to it.

When Peter was small it didn’t matter so much. The Eclector had enough lost children, rough and grown as they all were now, that looking out for someone small, someone with nothing, made sense to them. He’d be their mascot, their little doll in red leather they’d teach to swear and pick pockets and it was all a great game.

Kids grew up, though, and while Kraglin himself might have liked Peter Quill a little more as a person he could hold conversations with, what was cute in a kid was less cute in a teenager. He turned into the age that Ravagers often joined up with a crew and if Yondu wasn’t ready to treat him like the rest the rest was willing to. Expected it, even.

“He’s still a kid,” Yondu said, grumpy and eyes fixed on the serial he was definitely not paying attention to. 

“He says he’s Terran legal,” Kraglin said, and as Kraglin didn’t know how long Terrans lived he was willing to take Quill’s word for it. He looked it, skinny but taller than Kraglin, and he’d always looked enough like a Xandarian for Kraglin to think of him similarly. He’d been in training at that age. In a couple more years, not many, he’d be the same age Kraglin was when Yondu picked him up. 

“He ain’t a rookie, then. Waste to give him grunt work.” 

“Fine. But you gotta do something. He can’t keep like this. Someone’s gonna stab him.” Not one who’d known Quill as their scrawny little mascot, probably, but there’d been turnover over the years. There were enough that didn’t have that memory, that just knew Quill as the mouthy little shit that cheated at cards and got out of scrub duty. Still more that saw him stand up to Yondu and not get a proper smack or arrow-hole for it. That was more dangerous because, well, people seemed to like Quill despite themselves. Even the ones he cheated ended up smiling at him. And with the crew they attracted, the outlaw’s outlaws, the ones that needed a little more stick than carrot to keep in line, a young challenger could do a lot of damage.

Especially since Quill never seemed to appreciate all Yondu had done for him, over the years, something that sometimes made Kraglin want to stab Quill himself. 

Better to get him out. 

“What about a ship?” Kraglin asked, which made Yondu raise his head. “Contract him. He’s a smart kid, can start taking small jobs on his own. Give him one’a them M-ships, we take a cut as lease, can come get him if he gets in over his head.” 

Yondu looked thoughtful, tongue running over the silver spikes of his teeth. “You tryin’a get rid’a my boy?”

“Maybe,” Kraglin said, grinning, honest as he usually was with Yondu. “But I was ‘bout his age when I went to training. Kids that age, if you raise ‘em right, they want to get the hell away. Live their own life.” Gods knew it was what Kraglin had wanted to do, to stop listening to his dad be an idiot, stop having Maaiken steal the last chranroll when it was clearly his turn, stop being one of the Obfonteri mass and be Kraglin. 

Quill had been Yondu’s project, not his, but Kraglin was the only one of them all who’d had a childhood, so he tried to help, when he could. 

~

It worked okay.

~

It was the orb that fucked it all up. Not that Peter had taken it from them in the first place – he’d been sniping jobs lately, which was not great, another sign that he was an ungrateful little shit, but expected in their line of work, and they’d captured him for it – but that in the end, he’d left with it. Hadn’t brought it back to the Ravagers. Hadn’t come back at all.

Kraglin understood why. Sure, he’d grown up hating the Corps, but without the Collector and his security, there wasn’t a neutral place for the damn thing. He wasn’t much for nationalism, opium of the fucking masses, but seeing his home planet nearly destroyed shook him up. No one should own it. The Corps was better than whatever buyer they’d scrape up for it. 

He’d have been able to convince Yondu of that, if Peter had kept his word.

Instead, Peter took it himself, didn’t even bother talking to Yondu about it, and whatever fracture Stakar started finally broke. 

“He’s a clever boy, ain’t he?” Yondu had said, holding the little doll, a Terran thing Kraglin half-remembered from Peter’s room, but it didn’t have the kind of warmth it used to have. Yondu used to say that with pride and a laugh every time Quill turned up on the reports. Justification for keeping him. Vindication. Proof he’d done something right in his life.

It wasn’t warm now. It was something resigned, a tone that Kraglin had never heard out of Yondu before. It was that Peter had gone off with a new crew, a new family, and hadn’t looked back. It was that last, final reminder that Peter wasn’t his, had never been, that at his core it’d been Terran nobility and not Ravager loyalty, Ravager pride. That he didn’t care a damn thing about making Yondu look foolish when he could least afford to look so, when they’d lost good crew and ships fighting a battle they didn’t have to. 

Kraglin had taken the doll and led him to bed, held him until they fell asleep. He didn’t know what else to do. Decades together and Kraglin had never seen Yondu like it. He’d seen him incandescently angry, seen him weep with fury and fear, but Yondu had never been quiet. His emotions had always been outward, exuberant, a torrent of noise. 

It always suited Kraglin fine. He’d never been much good with words. He didn’t have to say much when Yondu was around, who half the time just wanted a sounding board for his ideas and the other half was content to fill in what little Kraglin did say himself. It worked. They worked. Yondu knew how he felt and that was enough. 

It meant, though, that Kraglin had no idea how to talk him out of it. That he was at a loss as a week went by and Yondu wasn’t back to himself. Enough remained that he ran the ship, held a smirk and a whistle on the bridge, but back in quarters he was someone else. Someone quiet, someone harsh. Someone wearing Yondu’s skin that didn’t have that softness, that sentimentality, that the real Yondu had.

Kraglin knew it was Peter Quill’s fault and Kraglin hated him for it, hated him for his callous disregard, the way it all worked out for him, the privilege he held and didn’t know. Peter didn’t deserve this, the way that Maaiken never deserved those rolls, just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right training. Kraglin taught him because that’s what he was supposed to do. Yondu gave it to him, regardless. 

Quill had made his choice, cut them out, and now Yondu had to do the same. Kraglin already had. He was good at that kind of thing. The Syndicate hadn’t picked him up just because he was good with a spreadsheet. They’d picked him up because he had the ability to see people as just numbers in that spreadsheet, numbers to move around and add and subtract, could do the cost/benefit analysis of selling them and moving them, keeping them or getting rid of them. Yondu always had that captain’s sentimentality, that willingness to believe the best. Kraglin always had to stand nearby when major punishment was carried out, because Kraglin’s businessman’s mind nearby meant that he could get done what needed to be done. If Peter was a write-off, he was a write-off. He’d done it to people where it was much harder, where Kraglin had to take some time and maybe even mourn a little, but he was already so angry with Peter that it had felt like a blessing. 

Liberating, even, to admit how he’d always resented the kid, resented how he’d taken Yondu from him. He’d barely got used to having Yondu and suddenly there was someone else in their lives, someone that Yondu risked everything to protect. How he never seemed to appreciate it, never understood that he was saved by Yondu, that he was taught by the best in the business, that he’d been given everything to succeed in this world. He was thriving because of what Yondu did for him. Mostly, Kraglin hated how he made Yondu hurt. 

Yondu didn’t deserve more pain. He wasn’t a good man, not entirely, but he’d had enough to equal it out. At least in Kraglin’s ledger. 

Quill wasn’t even worth the kindness due to a former Ravager, Kraglin was sure of that. The best thing would be to convince Yondu of that. It would hurt, and Gods, but Kraglin didn’t want to hurt him, not now, not ever even, but that was what he was for. Hard decisions. What needed to be done. 

~  
It would be easier if Yondu would talk to him. He wasn’t quiet, precisely, but that basic silence remained, the one Kraglin didn’t know what to do with, very little beyond talks of duty rosters and jobs to take. Even in quarters he spoke like a captain, brusque, like Kraglin was his first mate and no more, going to bed early after half-watching a serial he knew Kraglin wasn’t interested in. There was a stillness in his eyes, a distance that Kraglin still couldn’t bridge.

The crew noticed, too, Kraglin could tell. There was a delay in how Yondu responded to things, a lack of not only his normal viciousness, but his normal vitality, the spark that kept the crew liking him. That kept them laughing, knowing that Yondu was a step ahead of them, but on their side. There wasn’t anything anyone could point to, not really, but there was a shift in the way the crew spoke. The things they said. There was an unease that an increased frequency of trips to the bot-houses couldn’t fully alleviate. 

Kraglin himself was getting sick of bot-houses. He didn’t have a problem with them before. It was fun to change things up every so often, and he and Yondu had, over the yearss, had a lot of great times in them. Bots were nothing to think about, under normal circumstances. Under normal circumstances, Yondu spent his nights draped across Kraglin, face pressed into his shoulderblades. They hadn’t slept like that since Peter took the stone. Yondu had barely touched him since.

Kraglin wasn’t sure how he could miss someone he saw every day, but he missed Yondu desperately.

When he was younger and angrier he used to wonder why his mother stayed with his father, why he came back into the house every time he got out of the Nova prisons and why she didn’t turf him out again when he came up with another scheme, another idea that Kraglin knew wouldn’t come to anything. He knew it hurt her. He thought he’d learned why when he met Yondu, that over the yearss he understood a little more of his mother. He wondered now if his father had ever been like this, had ever come home and then shut her out. Pushed her away when she tried to help. How she’d got over it. How she’d fixed it.

He even considered calling her, in that house on Xandar they still shared, the one he’d grown up in. But he’d never been the kind of person to talk these things out. And he was worried, a little, that she wouldn’t have the answers he was looking for. That his father, for all his flaws, had never been like this. That there wasn’t a way out.

It didn’t surprise him all that much that Stakar showed up at the Iron Lotus when they were there. Decades spent avoiding him, keeping a track on his movements to make sure they don’t end up at the same place at the same time, and suddenly Stakar was in front of them, handsome face thickened and drooped with age but unmistakably the same thick-necked bastard that had fractured Yondu in the first place. It wouldn’t be coincidence. Not now. 

The sinking feeling enveloped Kraglin. It was going to get worse. It was going to get worse and he didn’t know how to make Yondu see.

~

Was the worst the mutiny, or was it the waiting? Kraglin would ponder that, would keep pondering that. The mutiny, when he’d finally lost his temper and Yondu’s eyes had livened up again, in pain but at least there again. It wouldn’t have been anything if that damn woman hadn’t shot the fin. Yondu would have arrow’d Taserface and the rest, they wouldn’t have lost good crew, and maybe Yondu would have come back to himself with the necessity of it all. 

Instead, Kraglin had to spend hours pretending to celebrate, waiting until they were all passed out enough to get the prototype fin (“for when we’re old an’ no one’s shooting at me,” Yondu had said, designed like the one he would have had if the Kree hadn’t cut the real one out of him, ostentatious and exuberant, and Kraglin could appreciate the gallows humor of the whole thing) and Yondu, hopefully, would want to take the ship back. 

He wasn’t sure why Taserface hadn’t spaced him with the rest, either that he wanted Yondu to watch him die or that he was dumb enough to think Kraglin was on his side, that he would actually turn on Yondu. If Kraglin had to guess, it would be the latter. Taserface was ambitious enough to grab the ship when the opportunity arose but not the kind of man who could keep it, mean and grasping and not smart enough to know how a captain should be. No one liked Taserface. No one would follow him more than a week. 

Had Kraglin turned on Yondu, though? The waiting was worse, maybe, because the last thing he wanted was for Yondu to think that, and Kraglin couldn’t stop wondering himself if he had, ticking down the hours as Taserface and his faction drank themselves into insensibility. He knew he was just waiting, but there was that part of him that had been hurt, that was still hurting, by Yondu shutting him out. That he was almost at his breaking point. That he had lost it, for him anyway, and told Yondu off in front of the crew because there was nothing left he could do, nothing else to try. Him, who had always known the value of discipline, of the chain of command. He and Yondu might have been fucking, might have been in love for decades, but he knew what his place on the ship was. He never disturbed it. Not until now.

Their room was trashed, and Kraglin wasn’t sure if there was a point to it or just wanton destruction. There was so much he couldn’t save, so much of their lives broken. He didn’t have Yondu’s sentimentality so much, but there was still a pang in taking in what had become of them. There was so much of their lives in these quarters. 

The plant-kid searching Yondu’s stuff was a good sign. At least Yondu was fighting, wanting to get out. Kraglin picked up the kid, the fin, whichever of Yondu’s little items he could fit in his pockets. 

His painting had been slashed. Kraglin touched the ripped seams of the canvas and left it where it was. 

~

“Y’came back for me.”

Kraglin’s head was still pounding, enough that he wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard Yondu. He hadn’t heard him come into the Third Quadrant quarters, the slightly smaller rooms they’d kept in case of emergency but never really used. Kraglin had considered sleeping there over the past weeks, but Yondu wasn’t the only one who was stubborn. Although he wasn’t managing to sit up right like Yondu was. Kraglin felt like he’d been run over a couple of times, pummeled by too many jumps in too short of a time. He was too old for this shit. Something about Centaurian biology, maybe. 

But there Yondu was, new fin perched on his head, looking at Kraglin with the kind of wonder he hadn’t seen in years. As miserable as Kraglin felt, seeing Yondu like this was the most cheering moment he’d had in ages. 

“Of course I did. The fuck you think I was going t’do? Let Taserface have the ship?” 

“Dunno.” Yondu lowered himself onto the bed carefully, wincing, far on the side like Kraglin was going to push him off. “Thought maybe I’d fine’ly done it. Crossed that line.” 

“Nah.” Kraglin bit his lip, willed himself to not shut his eyes. Yondu had to see. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find the right words, but Yondu could always read his face if he wanted to. He’d never been able to hide anything. “You ain’t getting’ rid of me that easily, Yondu.” 

“Weren’t that easy,” Yondu admitted, weary and beaten-down but still stubborn. Still focused on Kraglin, at least, and that was everything. “Did the best I could, I reckon.” 

“Still,” Kraglin protested, managing a little smile for Yondu, despite his exhaustion and everything else. Yondu had tried and Yondu had almost succeeded, in its way as crushing as the jumps. But they’d survived and Yondu came back to him. He held out his hand, an offering. “I ain’t leaving you.” 

Yondu grasped it with a gratifying swiftness. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he murmured, holding tight. “Sorry I ain’t been acting like it.” 

Kraglin didn’t tell him it was okay, because it wasn’t, but he did pull him onto the bed properly. They’d have to go sooner than Kraglin felt was wise, but he wanted this, needed this, felt he deserved it. A moment that was just his, theirs. He pressed his face into Yondu’s shoulder and breathed hard, remembering everything, the decades that had brought them here to this Gods-forsaken corner of the galaxy. To whatever they were going to do now, and what would come after. “You’re going after him, aren’t ya?”

Yondu stroked Kraglin’s hair gently, apologetically. “Yeah.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” Kraglin didn’t make a move to shift Yondu’s hand, but it stilled anyway, and he sighed. “All th’boy’s ever done is hurt you, Yondu. He don’t deserve you rescuing him.”

“Prolly not.” Yondu’s hand moved again, rough thumb curving over the tattoo at the base of Kraglin’s ear. “But that ain’t the point. I gotta do it. Won’t be able t’live with myself if I don’t try.” 

Kraglin swallowed and nodded against Yondu’s shoulder, suddenly unable to speak. He was still furious at Quill, but something clicked in his brain, something he hadn’t quite figured out, distressingly, before. It had never been Quill. Quill had never helped the situation, but it had never been about Quill, not really. It had always been Yondu, Yondu and his stubbornness, Yondu and his pride, Yondu and his softness and sentimentality and everything that Kraglin had always loved about him. Peter Quill deserved none of it, in Kraglin’s opinion, but it wasn’t about him. It was about Yondu. Yondu would keep coming for him, keep covering him, because it was who Yondu was. And Kraglin wouldn’t change that. It was everything he’d always loved about him.

He hoped Peter would learn that someday. He hoped there would be a time when Peter would come home for a holiday, Terran or Xandarian or whatever Yondu liked, show up at some little house they’d set up somewhere, and know that Yondu had always tried. 

For now, Kraglin pulled Yondu down and kissed him. He’d let Yondu ride out to rescue the boy, out into the unknown of a murderous Celestial and whatever insane, galaxy-spanning shit he’d got them into, but that would be later. For now, Yondu was Kraglin’s, and Kraglin was Yondu’s, and he wanted to make sure that Yondu left knowing that. Left knowing that he would always, always love Yondu, that he’d loved him from when he swaggered into Joscar’s and every moment after.

Everyone liked Yondu. But it was possible that Kraglin was the only one who loved him. Kraglin couldn’t say that was ideal. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he couldn’t stop. 

~

_Did I ever leave you_  
_Was I ever able_  
_Or are we still leaning_  
_Across the old table_

__

_Did I ever love you?_

__

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even go here, so hopefully the stuff I made up isn't too glaring. But I couldn't get it out of my head. Thanks for reading!


End file.
